Fail-Safe for Clouds

Companies with backup systems in place kept their businesses running when a major outage at Amazon shut down websites.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) outage that brought down a number of major Websites in mid-April, including social network sites Foursquare, HootSuite and Reddit, underscores the value of backup for cloud users—on traditional servers, another cloud or even another zone of their provider’s cloud. Amazon took the blame for the disruption, which involved the cloud’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage services, and said in a statement it will compensate customers.